I finally finished Dead Island using the character Sam B. As you can tell, since the game came out roughly two months ago, it took me quite some time. 24h 46m 04s to be exact. Actually that's not quite exact since I died a billion and two times and I am almost convinced that your game clock doesn't ding you for the multitude of times you play for two minutes from your save just to get punched in the face and genitals by a grandma zombie and loose your pocket wad. (The game dings you a random amount of money every time you die.) Since there is no way to tell how much time I wasted falling of cliffs and getting brain punched by Thug zombies we will just go with the aforementioned amount of gorey hours.
After playing through the game I would recommend it to anyone who's got some time to burn and hankering for carving up some zombays as my co-op player Anthony Whittrock affectionately called them--right before I blew him up... A lot.
While I'm on it the co-op in this game is great for farting around, blowing up propane tanks to close to each other, driving off cliffs while your friends are in the passenger seat and once in a while even accomplishing some meaning full tasks. In fact the game is near impossible to finish without the help of another person wildly swinging weapons in your close proximity. Which conveniently is what I will blame the large chunk of my deaths because I was alone for most of my playthrough.
Don't get me wrong it's nobody's fault but my own since there is an endless amount of faceless zombie destroyers waiting to team up with you online. The drop in and out co-op makes this painless. I didn't want to use it, though, because I like to play games while I watch TV and find all manner of ways to get distracted and forget that some poor sod halfway across the world is getting angrier and angrier at me because I am in the kitchen burning a pizza and not going through a door that would progress the story line of the game. That said I also dislike the thought of loosing and precious treasures while I am afk.. or afcontroller more appropriately. I need my preciouses, all of them.
I am a giant loot hoor. I care about loot and I care about it a lot. This is another reason why Dead Island is fun to play--there's literally shit lying everywhere. Well not literally shit more like a vast array of weapons and ingredients tucked into every nook and cranny of the island. That's right I did say ingredients there and you can make your own weapons. You know what's cooler than slashing a zombie's arm off with a machete? Well when you cut it's arm off and then the zombie gets electrocuted, or poisoned, or starts on fire, that's what. Well in Dead Island you get to take ordinary weapons and then you bad ass em up a bit. You can wrap barbed wire around a sledgehammer, there's the classic nails in a baseball bat and even make poison bullets--somehow you can poison something that's dead. Don't ask just shoot because your gun doesn't get damaged like your melee weapons.
Going into Dead Island I thought the weapons getting damaged mechanic was going to be a game killer for me. After all I famously rage quit Fall Out 3 after my launch anything weapon broke after a mere hour of shooting flaming teddy bears. but I digress. It's true your weapons do get damaged at a speed which is highly unrealistic. Shouldn't your weapons suffer less damage since zombies are so soft and pulpy? More annoying though is you can't upgrade or modify a damaged weapon so you have to constantly repair your bent knifes and broken sticks. This would be a giant pain in the ass if the developers didn't graciously litter the landscape with workbenches, at which you can repair your wares for a nominal fee.
If you're like me and you can't help your self from rooting in every zombies pockets and bikini bottoms, then you'll have no shortage of cash flow to make it rain on your favorite baseball bat that you turned into a spiked morning star (yes it's gloriously true those exist in this game). There are also traders littered around every human base. So, if the corpse robbing you've been doing isn't up to snuff for your needs of tools of destruction, you can also sell your bent hammer that you don't feel like fixing again. You might as well sell your hammers since the blunt weapons don't progress as high in damage output as the sharper stabbier ones.
The fall of blunt weapons bothered me since I was playing with Sam B, the expert in blunt weaponry. Since I juiced his skill tree to favor blunt weapons I was sorely disappointing that I had to abandon them later on in the game and have a lot of wasted skill points. Oh yeah there's skill trees in this game now pick your jaw up off the floor and put your genitals back in your pants. I know it's pretty ridiculously awesome that this hack and slash has all the right parts of an RPG and not to much of the sleep inducing forever-long conversations. Knowing what I know now though about the skill trees I would highly recommend playing as Xian since she specializes in sharp weaponry.
The good thing about each character is that even though they have specialties they are still customizable because each character has three skill trees you can plunk a point into every level your character progresses. You can choose everything from lock picking to zombie head stomping. I would have said corpse there instead of overusing the word zombie but that would be misleading because there are human enemies you have to fight in this game and you cannot stomp on their heads when they become corpses, sadly.
That's right this game is not exempt from that annoying zombie premise that makes you have to fight humans because "we're the real monsters". Which is even lamer because aren't the zombies just resurrected dead us's anyway? As much as I hate this cliched turn of events you don't have to worry about it too much because any pea shooter you happen to be packin will pop the human eggshell heads in a single shot. If however you don't blast them in the face and choose rather to get in close to mele range you'll just die because they can take a severe beating. True to the annoying overused sub plot of humans vs humans it is you in these situations that is always the pulpy tender victim.
That should pretty much cover everything about this game besides the plot. I don't want to ruin it for you so I'll leave that out. You'll just have to find out for yourself. They say the real enjoyment is in the journey, which is even more enjoyable when your committing zombie genocide everywhere from a beach to a jungle to a prison.
